Sociology Compass - 2021 - Pospěch - Policing Cities Incivility Disorder and Societal Transformations

Received: 30 September 2020
DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12857
ARTICLE
- -
Revised: 17 December 2020 Accepted: 23 December 2020
Policing cities: Incivility, disorder, and societal

transformations
Pavel Pospěch
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social

Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Abstract
Republic
Over the past 30 years, we have been witnessing a rise in
Correspondence incivility policing across western but also non‐western cit-
Pavel Pospěch, Department of Sociology, ies. The term “incivility policing” refers to bans and exclu-
Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University,
Joštova 10, Brno 60200, Czech Republic.
sion aimed at drinking alcohol, begging, loitering, sitting in
Email: pospech@fss.muni.cz public, and many other kinds of subcriminal conduct.
Scholars have observed an increasing readiness to demand
legal “solutions” aimed against these kinds of conduct. In
this paper, I review two major strands of scholarship
dealing with the origins of these calls: First, a rising puni-
tiveness and a “law and order” mentality, inspired by the
Broken windows theory and Zero tolerance policies. Sec-
ond, privatization of space and the rising influence of
private actors over public spaces are discussed with ref-
erences to the concepts of neoliberalism, revanchism, and
the right to the city. The effect of incivility policing on
vulnerable groups is examined using the example of
homeless people in public space. In the final part, I suggest
new factors which could help us understand the rise in
incivility policing: These include general trust, everyday
trust, and the imaginaries of community.
KEYWORDS
broken windows, city, incivility, policing, privatization, public space,
trust
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1 | INTRODUCTION
In current research on urban public space, there is a growing consensus on a rise in incivility‐targeted policing and
on the increasing regulation of public space in general. Cities across the west are introducing ordinances, bylaws
and legal measures aimed against uncivil and disorderly conduct, with the latter category expanding to include
street drinking, begging, loitering, rough sleeping, seating, various forms of “anti‐social behavior (ASB),” and other
activities, whose harmfulness is questionable. In this paper, I will follow Peršak (2016a) and refer to these de-
velopments under a common header of “incivility policing,” despite the fact that the questions of what exactly is
civil and uncivil in public space are very much unanswered. Yet, we are witnessing an increasing readiness to
demand legal action which would target uncivil behavior and strip the urban experience of the encounters with
potential discomfort.
What are the factors which contribute to the steep rise in demand for legal interventions over the past
30 years? In this review, I will discuss two major strands of scholarship which have emerged from urban studies,
sociology, criminology, and geography: First, a general rise in punitiveness in local and national policies corresponds
to calls for “law and order” in the streets. The icons of this ethos—the “Zero tolerance” of the former mayor of New
York Rudolph Giuliani and the infamous Broken windows theory—have been successfully exported from the US to
other western countries and cities (Newburn & Jones, 2007). Law and order has become a popular rallying cry for
politicians, from small‐town mayors to populist autocrats like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Second, the rise of incivility policing plays into commercial interests: Whether of tourist industry, of local busi-
nesses or of universities which seek to attract students from well‐off families, there is a strong pressure by private
actors towards sanitization and purification of space (Amster, 2003). These developments are often referred to
under an umbrella term privatization of space (Kohn, 2004) which relates to privately owned city spaces such as
shopping malls (Staeheli & Mitchell, 2006), public–private partnerships and hybrids and to commercial pressures on
public actors.
In this paper, I will discuss the rise of incivility policing within the context of these two major areas of
research: Punitiveness and privatization. I will identify key observations and theoretical developments within each
of the traditions and, consequently, discuss the impact of incivility policies on marginal and vulnerable groups and
their exclusion from urban spaces, using the example of homeless people in public space. In the final part of the
paper, I will look beyond both punitiveness and privatization to suggest other structural and cultural factors
which could be linked to the increased demand for incivility policing. These will include general trust, the
everyday trust on the interaction level, and the imaginaries of community which are reproduced in the public
discourses.
2 | POLICING INCIVILITY, REGULATING URBAN SPACE
Concerns over crime and disorder are at the heart of policymakers' growing interest in regulating incivilities
(Burney, 2009; Di Ronco & Peršak, 2014). By addressing concerns not only about crime itself but also about the fear
of crime, these policies have gained a wider scope which also includes “subcriminal behavior”—mostly minor of-
fenses which are seen as inconsistent with middle‐class standards of conduct (Frevel, 2006). The reference to
middle class is not accidental: According to Sylvestre (2010) the middle classes are the most important secondary
target of such policies. While members of the middle class rarely find themselves on the receiving end of the bans
on drinking, begging, and loitering, they are the primary audience of how these bans are performed. By policing
conduct in public spaces, cities hope to lure the middle classes back into their public space in an attempt to recreate
what at least looks like a lively, informally controlled public space (Sylvestre, 2010). While this vision is what many,
including the critics of incivility policing, will subscribe to, it is the means of achieving this goal which are
contentious, as Atkinson puts it:
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(R)esidential desires for safety and relative social homogeneity are influencing the choices made
about public spaces in order to enjoy the experience of the street without its dangers. Privatized and
residential images drive a visualization of the kinds of “public” that should be allowed to use public
spaces. Like an architect's sketch, the public is often white, male and wearing a suit (…) A problem with
many of these developments is that they appeal to many while feeling oppressive to others.
(Atkinson, 2003, pp. 1841–1842)
The notion of a “street without its dangers” is a crucial reference when considered in the context of the rise of
privately owned commercial spaces, such as shopping malls and privately owned developments, squares, and plazas
(Pratt, 2017). Researchers have shown that the idea of an urban or quasi‐urban street without the dangers and
unpredictabilities of the world of strangers is at the core of mall marketing, especially in its appeal to women and
families (Pospěch, 2017). Consequently, municipal administrators find themselves in a difficult position, and they
seek to even up their comparative disadvantage to privately run malls through incivility policing.
In this process, the political and public calls for punitive measures of law and order and the interests of private
actors go hand‐in‐hand; however, for analytical purposes, I will discuss them separately on the following pages,
starting with punitiveness first.
3 | PUNITIVENESS
Early studies of the rise in incivility policing include influential books by Davis (1990) and Smith (1996), writing
about the US megacities of the early 1990s, at a time when US municipal administrators were adopting new sets of
policies aimed at regulating public spaces. Backgrounding these policies were rising societal concerns about crime,
waves of crime‐related moral panic (Cohen, 1972) and new criminological concepts, providing legitimacy for the
new policies. Among these, the notorious broken‐windows theory has been the most influential, even though its
validity has been generally disproved (Eck & Maguire, 2000; Harcourt & Ludwig, 2006; Sampson & Rauden-
bush, 1999). The idea that an unrepaired broken window is a signal to potential criminals was, however, powerful in
its simplicity, and it appealed to policymakers concerned with the rising fears of crime and calls for law and order.
The possible extension from a physical incivility to a social one was apparent, as Sylvestre (2010, p. 807) put it:
“being noisy, lying down in the street, begging, or soliciting drivers can not only be seen as a loosening of one's
posture and moral standards, but also poses a threat to a specific social order that is seen as worth preserving.”
The rise in numbers and scope of policies targeting uncivil and disorderly conduct has been almost universal
throughout western cities. Discarding the diversity of the national developments, there is a clear convergence
towards lessening tolerance to small‐scale deviance (Galdon‐Clavell, 2016), described as “defining deviancy up”
(Mooney & Young, 2006) and punitive populism (Wacquant, 2009). The rise in punitiveness has been theorized by
Unnever and Cullen (2010) who suggest that punitivity grows with perceptions of escalating crime and with a sense
of moral decline. The turn away from social solutions towards sanctions and the preference for harsh punishments
are thus rooted in narratives of descent (Frye, 1957) which portray society as increasingly dangerous and moral
authority as increasingly frail (Brown & Socia, 2017). The common governing mentality for these developments is
one of “preventive exclusion,” whereby security is valued more highly than individual rights, and exclusion is
pursued at the expense of inclusion. Peršak describes the approach as “governing through disorder,” whereby
“criminalization is no longer a last resort, but a routine system for managing disorder” (Peršak, 2016a, p. 3). This
shift in criminalization from actual criminal conduct towards sub‐criminal incivility and nuisance has been made
possible by the broken‐windows‐inspired notion of a slippery slope between these categories. Thus, the notion of
risk can be expanded from moral to aesthetic concerns, often informed by a rosy retrospection of and nostalgia for
an imagined “order” of the past (Sennett, 1986).
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On the level of specific policies, there is a difference in territorial arrangements, ranging from state‐wide
measures to local and municipal ordinances. As Galdon‐Clavell (2016) notes, local authorities have become more
active in claiming their regulatory rights, and the possibility of developing their own policy agendas became an
important part of local politics. Incivilities are broadly defined as “deterioration of the shared rules of civil harmony,
the violation of standards of care and maintenance of urban environments and shared public urban spaces” (Cal-
aresu, 2016, p. 35) and the term “incivility” is generally synonymous with the term “disorder.” According to Cal-
aresu, the most typically targeted incivilities include consumption of alcohol, prostitution, vandalism or damage to
property, serving food and beverages, rubbish dumping, begging, noise and camping. Bans on alcohol consumption
have been studied extensively (Dixon et al., 2006; Jayne et al., 2006), and a number of various policies are aimed
against begging, loitering, and “hanging around” (Flint, 2006; Sylvestre, 2010; Weichselbaum, 2013), with dispersal
orders allowing the police to ban selected individuals from certain areas (Beckett & Herbert, 2009). These measures
often include bans on sitting and/or lying down in public space (Beckett & Herbert, 2009; Blomley, 2010; Mitch-
ell, 1997) as activities associated with vagrancy (Ellickson, 1996; Feldman, 2004; Mitchell, 1995, 1997). Yet other
regulatory policies of public space in the UK ban skateboarding, street vending (Coleman, 2004), walking with
dogs (Sylvestre, 2010) and many other activities deemed uncivil (Gayet‐Viaud, 2017; Peršak, 2016a). As Galdon‐
Clavell (2016) shows, the regulatory ordinances are framed by references to the rights of the majority, which are to
be protected and enforced by law.
Among the specific local and national policies, the British notion of ASB has garnered considerable interest in
academia and amongst the critics of incivility policing (Burney, 2009; Flint, 2006; Millie, 2008, 2009; Squires 2008;
Squires & Stephen, 2005; Waiton, 2010). Conceived of in a 1998 law as “acting in a manner that caused or was
likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as [the perpe-
trator],” ASB was vaguely and flexibly formulated using highly contingent terms of harassment alarm and distress to
the point that “the behavior of others may be seen as anti‐social simply because it does not fit our particular
cultural and social understandings of norms of behavior” (Millie, 2008, p. 383). The looseness and context‐
dependence of ASBOs (replaced by Injunctions in a 2014 revision of the act) leads to their targeting of specific
groups whose sole presence, rather than specific behavior, is subject to exclusion. On the other side of the moral
divide, there is always a law‐abiding “community,” which is portrayed as jeopardized by ASB (Peršak, 2016b).
The other “community” which sees its functioning endangered by ASB and incivilities is the commercial one.
The interests of private actors, investors, and developers are at what many see as a core of the drive towards
incivility policing.
4 | THE HAND OF THE MARKET
A major criticism of this rise of incivility policing is related to the conflict between the universal promise of citi-
zenship and the particular interests of the market. This translates as a tension between equality and inequality:
While the sphere of citizenship is based on the equality of civil and political rights in liberal democracy, markets are
by definition unequal, as a market is essentially a tool for allocating inequality. The concern is, therefore, that the
inequality of the markets is entering urban space and transforming it, while it is felt that urban public space ought
to be a space of equal rights. This is also what makes the late 20th century and early 21st century wave of incivility
policing distinct: One could indeed argue that urban space was always subject to regulation and exclusion
(Loukaitou‐Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2009) and that the idea of a chaotic, somewhat unpredictable “world of
strangers” (Lofland, 1973) is, in itself, an antithesis to the rational, Enlightenment‐led project of modernity. There is
a difference between the old and the new regulation, though. As late as 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that those who try
to normalize and “suburbanize” public space fail, because they mistake the order of the street for chaos
(Jacobs, 1961). For Jacobs, however, this was an error of the planners of the 1950s, which she sought to rectify with
her book. Thirty years later, scholars like Davis (1990), Sorkin (1992) and Mitchell (1995) no longer see “an error”
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as an option. In their view, the regulative and exclusionary policies are premediated and strategic. Errors are out of
question. The motivation behind this strategy—behind the new wave of incivility policing—lies in the interests of the
market.
The influx of market‐led interests into public space has been discussed under the heading of privatization of
space (Kohn, 2004; Low, 2006) in at least two senses. First, urban spaces are increasingly often owned or managed
by private actors who impose upon such spaces their own definitions of civility, deviance and a “right” citizenship
(Németh, 2009). Second, more broadly, even when urban spaces remain in public hands, the public bodies in charge
will manage them in accordance with what they see as the best interest of the local and global businesses (Martinais
& Bétin, 2004). Thus, the attractiveness of cities for businesses is fostered by making their public spaces clean and
safe (Helms et al., 2007). Images of clean and safe, incivility‐free cities are also used in global processes of branding
and marketing cities (Galdon‐Clavell, 2016; Sassen, 2001; Smith, 1996). Ranasinghe (2011) claims that consumption
is a part of a basic conceptual triad of public space (the others being civility and community), as spaces are
increasingly designed and managed for the consuming public. The fundamental values of freedom and mobility are
increasingly redefined in a consumption‐related sense: A freedom to choose and the mobility of the consumer,
juxtaposed against the image of the static beggar and panhandler (Bauman, 2006). The “flawed consumers” find
themselves at the receiving end of incivility policing, punished for their poverty and their inability or unwillingness
to join in the consumption spectacle. The equality of citizenship is retained, but only for some.
Around the world, shopping malls have become icons of the process of privatization, joining seductive, dream‐
like worlds of consumption (Goss, 1993, 1999) with strict exclusionary policies, aiming at the removal of unde-
sirable conduct and of those groups which are associated with it. Inevitably, these include homeless people, ethnic
minorities, “unruly” youth and many other marginal and vulnerable visitors (Pospěch, 2016; Staeheli & Mitch-
ell, 2006). Despite the global presence of these development, the privatization thesis has garnered some criticism,
regarding its geographic scope. Atkinson (2003), Allen (2006), and Helms et al. (2007) have argued that the
narrative is mainly US based and does not apply very well to European cities. Atkinson claims that it is an over-
simplification to seek the rationale of incivility policing only among the interests of the wealthy and the powerful.
He believes that the phenomenon is connected to a more general process of retreat into the private sphere which
disregards the borders of class (Atkinson, 2003). From a different perspective, Blomley (2010, 2012) criticizes the
privatization thesis, referring rather to the right to walk without being harassed and the corresponding contractual
nature of movement in public. In the language of incivility ordinances, Blomley identifies references to “circulation,”
“mobility,” and “obstacles”: In Blomley's view, the police are not primarily servants of the wealthy, attacking the
rights of marginal groups. Rather, their view is that of a traffic engineer, acting against obstruction and conflict
(Blomley, 2012, p. 932). Yet, regardless of the police perspective, incivility policing has a heavy impact on the lives
of marginal and vulnerable groups.
5 | INCIVILITY POLICING AND GROUPS
As the border between danger of crime and the discomfort caused by incivility is becoming porous and these two
terms are becoming conflated (Loukaitou‐Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2009), the quasi‐criminal laws change the legal
system, since they “delineate basic citizenship right through a merit‐based philosophy that rewards compliance with
socially desirable forms of behavior” (Palmer & Warren, 2013, p. 80). Scholars have expressed concern that a hyper‐
regulated space is no longer truly public, as it lacks the elements of spontaneity, unpredictability and diversity of
the world of strangers and replaces them with homogeneity and sterility (Barker, 2009; Davis, 1990; Sorkin, 1992;
Zukin, 2010). Such public space is normalized in line with arbitrary definitions of undesirability (Dixon et al., 2006;
Pleysier, 2016) and controlled in a presumptive way: Rather than punishing crime, incivility policing tries to
anticipate possible sources of conflict and remove them in the name of preventive exclusion (Barker, 2009). As a
consequence, those groups which are too different from the perceived normality might find themselves unwanted
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in public space (Peršak, 2016b). This constitutes the revocation of the Lefebvrian right to the city, the right to
legitimately participate and legitimately appropriate public space. In this sense, scholars have warned against the
“end of public space” (Sorkin, 1992; Mitchell, 1995, 2003) through the decline of civil liberties and of publicness in
general. The exclusion of unwanted groups as a means of preserving civility in public space is never‐ending; a “cycle
of intolerance” (Galdon‐Clavell, 2016, p. 1935) follows, whereby the removal of some groups make other groups
more visible and a never‐ending pursuit of a clean public space ensues.
Among group‐targeted policies, those aimed at homeless people have been prominently discussed in academic
literature. Ranasinghe (2011) has divided this writing into two streams, the first of which connects vagrancy
legislation to concerns outside of or beyond the level of public space, most notably to consumption, aesthetics or
racial politics. In the second stream, vagrancy law is linked to the production of urban public space and the spaces of
consumption. In these spaces, homelessness is experienced as “dirt” on the clean image of public space, a signifier of
moral inferiority, dysfunctionality and abjection. By being exposed to the public's gaze and to the gaze of authority
(Gerrard & Farrugia, 2015), the suffering of homeless people becomes a part of an ideological dilemma of the public
and the private: “By being out of place, homeless people threaten the ‘proper' meaning of place,” Mitchell (1997)
writes, adding:
[B]y doing private things in public space, homeless people threaten not just the space itself, but also
the very ideals upon which we have constructed our rather fragile notions of legitimate citizenship.
Homeless people scare us: They threaten the ideological construction which declares that publicity—
and action in public space—must be voluntary. Citizenship is based on notions of volunteerism in
contemporary democracies. Private citizens […] always have the option of retreating back into pri-
vate, into their homes, into those places over which they presumably have sovereign control. The
public sphere is thus a voluntary one, and the involuntary publicity of the homeless is thus profoundly
unsettling. (Mitchell, 1997, p. 321)
Mitchell shows that throughout the waves of mobilizations and moral panics, the actions of homeless people
are translated from (a) spatially misplaced on the public‐private axis to (b) morally unacceptable—and legally
penalized. Obscured in the process is the fact that such course of action threatens the chances of survival of the
weakest members of society.
Most studies focusing on anti‐homeless policies come from US cities and reflect the observation of Lou-
kaitou‐Sideris and Ehrenfeucht (2009) that US society has not reached a moral or legal consensus on how to
react to homeless people in public space. The discomfort experienced when encountering a homeless person is
reframed as danger, which leads to the criminalization of ordinary actions: Eating, sleeping, sitting on the
pavement and so on. Researchers studying the criminalization of homeless people (Amster, 2003, 2008;
DeVerteuil et al. 2009; Mitchell, 1997, 2003; Smith, 1996; Snow & Mulcahy, 2001; Von Mahs, 2011, 2013a,
2013b) have shown that bylaws and policies aimed at the regulation of everyday conduct of the homeless are in
use in most major US cities although the constitutional status of these measures is questionable (Von Mahs,
2013a). The legislation is often premised on a binary classification of us versus them, whereby the homeless are
othered by reference to standards of morality or hygiene (Amster, 2003). The legal measures are often
accompanied by “soft‐control” design elements, such as anti‐sleeping benches and other arrangements which
co‐act in the exclusion of homeless people and the maintenance of the commercialized aesthetics of public space
(Gerrard & Farrugia, 2015).
A comparatively smaller number of studies from Europe have yielded a somewhat different image, yet there
are converging trends. In the UK, anti‐homeless policies are as harsh as in US cities (Fitzpatrick et al., 2011;
Moss & Moss, 2019); many other European countries are following along this path, as Podoletz (2016) has
shown on the case of Hungary. In Berlin, Von Mahs (2013b) has also observed a policy transfer from US cities,
yet he has identified a difference in the underlying legislation, as “in Europe, at least, such exclusionary
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measures are less the result of explicit anti‐homeless ordinances than of selective enforcement of existing public
order and safety laws and regulations” (2013b, p. 178). As a result, the homeless people of Berlin encounter
anti‐homeless policies more often in private spaces, such as railway stations, than in the public spaces of the city
(Von Mahs, 2013b).
6 | BEYOND PUNITIVENESS AND MARKET: TRUST AND CHANGING IMAGINARIES

OF SOCIAL LIFE
In an entry to the International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Mitchell and Staeheli (2009) have argued that
the problems of policing and exclusion have become central to the recent research on urban public space. While
much of this research is rooted in the urban political economy approach, emphasizing the concerns about neoliberal
governance (Hackworth, 2007), revanchism, as a revenge of the conservative elites against the liberal city (Smith,
1996) and the right to the city (Mitchell, 2003), there is still room to link the well‐described developments to other
macrosocial factors—both in terms of structural transformations of contemporary western societies and in terms of
the changing imaginaries of these societies: The various ways in which urban spaces are experienced, enjoyed,
feared, and regulated are quite possibly rooted in factors which lie beyond the borders of the urban in the broadest
sense. Siebel and Wehrheim's (2006) study provides one such example, speculating about the effects of factors such
as population aging, individualization of lifestyles and privatization of media. Other researchers have focused on
specific issues, such as the 20th century policy of deinstitutionalization in the US which left many mentally ill on the
streets of US cities (Loukaitou‐Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2009). Yet, others have linked the policies to the way moral
boundaries of belonging are established (Jaworsky, 2013) and to changing notions of risk as “spatialized virtue”
(Osborne & Rose, 1999). There is also a sizable body of research on the historical and contemporary exclusion and
self‐exclusion of women from urban public spaces (Hemphill, 2002, pp. 1620–1860; Jerram, 2011; Loukaito u‐
Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2009; Osman & J íchová, 2019; Sewell, 2011).
At the risk of partially restating some of the claims which have been made in the impressive body of literature
on incivility policing, I would like to discuss avenues for further research which will allow to link the developments
in incivility policing to other social phenomena beyond those which have been discussed already. These include
trust, both general and in everyday interaction, and the shared imaginaries of and beliefs about community and its
transformation.
Questions regarding generalized trust in others are a routine part of international value surveys, yet a similarly
macro‐level sociological connection between the levels of generalized trust and the volume of calls for tighter
regulation of incivility in public space—perhaps due to the difficulty of operationalizing the latter—still needs to be
established. While the relationship between incivility, trust and community has been studied in empirical and
theoretical contexts (Hancock, 2001, Per šak, 2016b, Walklate, 2000), a larger theoretical synthesis could link
incivility policing with the works on declining generalized trust (Lenard, 2005), social capital (Putnam, 2000) and a
general disenchantment with civic and community life (Bailey, 2000; Kumar, 1995; Weintraub& Kumar, 1997). The
notion of privatism has been discussed as “carving up of the public sphere by local privatized interests” (Boggs,
1997, p. 750) and a retreat into private sphere could well have an adverse effect on the readiness to experience
urban life without the demands for exclusion of those who don't conform to the middle class lifestyle. The link
between generalized trust and demands for regulation of urban space can also be examined through the experience
of rapid social change, as in Weszkalnys (2007) study of Berlin's Alexanderplatz. Another hypothesis comes from
the research of etiquette, conducted by Cas Wouters, a student of Norbert Elias. While Wouters '(2004) central
thesis is that of informalisation of manners across the 20th century, he also argues that formal social control is a
common requirement in settings with lower levels of social integration: External social controls, like incivility
policing, are more likely to be in demand in countries such as the US, where people may feel there is not enough
cultural “common ground” to rely on informal social controls (Wouters, 2004).
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This turn towards everyday conduct leads us towards the interactionist tradition. In her influential commentary
on Goffman's theory of the interaction order, Misztal (2001) argues that a subjective feeling of safety in any shared
space is directly predicated on low‐level trust produced through the observation of interaction rituals. A correct
performance of the rituals of interaction is a fundamental prerequisite for a shared sense normality and predict-
ability of social life, where “to be awkward or unkempt is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds” (Goffman,
1961, p. 81). These impersonal, highly ritualized performances are a central requirement of public life (Kaufmann,
2006; Tonkiss, 2003), yet, as Sennett (1986) famously pointed out, they tend to be contrasted with the desire for a
warm, intimate community. The desire to overcome impersonality appears humane on the surface, but it leads to a
calls for exclusion of those who are not “like us”: The communitarian longing for intimate relationships paves a
direct path towards a ghetto‐like mentality, excluding those who look, behave or consume differently (Sennett,
1986).
Like Lofland in her World of Strangers (1973), Sennett turns to Simmel's concept of a stranger as someone close
yet unknown, to forge a metaphor of urban coexistence. For the present purpose, however, a more fitting figure of a
stranger is the one described by Schütz in 1944: A stranger lacks access to the “cultural pattern of group life”—the
”peculiar valuations, institutions and systems of orientation and guidance (such as the folkways, mores, laws, habits,
customs, etiquette, fashions) which (…) characterize—if not constitute—any social group” (1944, p. 499). Schütz
illustrates his idea with an example: “He who wants to travel by railroad has to behave in that typical way which the
type “railroad agent” may reasonably expect as the typical conduct of the type “passenger” and vice versa” (1944,
p. 505). Thinking with Schütz invites us to consider interaction among those who don't share the same idea of the
“railroad agent”—or those who don't share the same idea of civility. It is here that the social imaginaries of com-
munity come into play: Much of the subjective feeling of safety, as described by Misztal, comes from an imagined
homogeneity: Indeed, we can trust the civil functions of interpersonal rituals only insofar, as we assume a shared
knowledge of the requirements they impose (Dennis et al.,2013). Consider Wehrheim's study of a German shopping
mall which its visitors described as “stress‐free, familiar, harmonic and safe” (Wehrheim, 2007, p. 278) only because
they believed the roles and motivations of other patrons were the same as theirs. Sure enough, these feelings of
safety were grounded in a social homogeneity which was upheld by exclusionary policies, CCTV cameras and se-
curity personnel of the mall. Still, the mall case reminds us that trust in the everyday interaction ritual may be
undermined, and calls for formal policing may be increased, if we are led to believe that others don't share the same
cultural vocabulary as we do. Such beliefs may find their origin in the contemporary rise of populism which feeds on
othering ethnic and national minorities (Brayson, 2019; Valentine & Harris, 2016), but one can also speculate about
other, more benign forms of othering, such as the generation gap and divergent uses of public space by the young
and the elderly (for examples, see Jayne et al., 2006; Panelli et al., 2002).
By all means, the beliefs which put interpersonal trust in public space into question, are rarely a product of a
data‐based reflection. Rather, they are based on the imaginaries of community: If we believe that our communities
are fragmented and polarized, we are more likely to call for legal measures to regulate public space. Looking for the
origins of the beliefs in fragmentation and polarization may provide another useful way of thinking about the causes
behind the rise of incivility policing.
OR C I D
Pavel Pospěch https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4048-683X
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A U TH O R BI O GR A PH Y
Pavel Pospěch is an associate professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology of the Masaryk University
and a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. His areas of interest include urban public space,
rural sociology and cultural sociology. His works have appeared in the European Journal of Social Theory,
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Space and Culture and other journals. He is
the Editor‐in‐Chief of Sociální studia/Social Studies.
S U P P O R T IN G I N F O R M A T I O N
Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section at the end of this
article.
How to cite this article: Pospěch P. Policing cities: Incivility, disorder, and societal transformations. Sociology
Compass. 2021;15:e12857. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12857

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Policing cities: Incivility, disorder, and societal

Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social

2 | POLICING INCIVILITY, REGULATING URBAN SPACE

4 | THE HAND OF THE MARKET

5 | INCIVILITY POLICING AND GROUPS

6 | BEYOND PUNITIVENESS AND MARKET: TRUST AND CHANGING IMAGINARIES

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